


We Are All Made of Dust

by OnAWhim



Series: Avengers By Association [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Science, The Dusting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-28
Updated: 2018-07-27
Packaged: 2019-05-14 21:27:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14777543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OnAWhim/pseuds/OnAWhim
Summary: Spoilers for Infinity War....The Dusting affects the whole world, including our favorite science trio: Jane, Darcy, and Erik. Can science save the world once more or will Jane have to get in touch with some old friends? Can anyone fix this?





	1. Distracted From Dust

**Author's Note:**

> This work is part of a collection of stories which will be interwoven in sequels, but they should also read okay as stand alone works if that’s what you’re looking for. There are four stories in the first stage of this series, so I highly encourage you to check out the rest. :) 
> 
> This is my first time trying to write something like this, so I welcome any and all feedback. Also, comments make my day, so drop a line.

Jane thought she was done with aliens when she broke up with Thor. She’d never gotten into astrophysics with the intention of straying so far into astrobiology, but then New Mexico happened. And then London and Asgard. 

She was happy to be back to her own research, albeit with much better funding from Stark Industries and SHIELD. When there were reports of Thor being spotted in New York City a few months ago, she’d ignored them as best as she could. 

She was interrupted from her equations and reverie by the piercing shout of Darcy. 

“Jane!” Darcy stopped to catch her breath. “Thor’s back again!”

“Not here, right?” 

“No, he’s in Africa. And it looks like space is treating him well. He has a new axe and his hair is short.”

“What’s he doing in Africa? Wait, no, nevermind. I don’t want to know.” She tried to clamp down on her curiosity. It had been almost a year since she ended things with him. She needed to stay focused on her work, and on moving on.

“Janey, I know you’re ‘over him’ and all that, but you’ve got to at least watch the news. It’s the aliens from New York again.” Darcy got to work tidying the stacks of paper Jane had just been looking through. 

“It’s not affecting our work and I can’t just stay glued to the television every time Thor drops by the planet.” She turned back to her code and continued debugging the simulation. Something in between the coordinate conversion and plotting was messing it up.

“If only he’d bring his brother with him more often…” 

“Darcy!” It wasn’t the first time Darcy had commented on the aesthetic appeal of Thor’s brother. 

“What? C’mon even you have-“ 

Just then, Jane heard the flutter of papers dropping to the floor. For goodness sakes, Darcy always was clumsy when she was distracted. Sighing, she turned around. 

But instead of an apologetic Darcy scrambling to pick up the itinerant papers, she was met with an empty room. The papers littered the floor along with an inexplicable pile of dust. 

“Darcy?” Jane called out. Nothing. Her voice echoed through the room. 

That was weird. But then again, weird was the usual for Darcy. Jane returned to her work. 

Darcy didn’t return all afternoon. She occasionally took the afternoons off, but she always told Jane, even if Jane was sometimes too distracted too remember. And leaving the papers scattered about was so unlike her. Jane began to worry. 

Pulling up Skype, she called Erik. Perhaps he had heard from her. And at the very least she had some questions that they were supposed to have addressed in their meeting earlier that afternoon… or was it tomorrow? She checked her calendar. Yes, the meeting was supposed to have been earlier today. Very odd. In fact, she noticed it was well past seven. Darcy hadn’t even called to make sure she’d taken a break for dinner. Something was definitely wrong. And Erik wasn’t answering the Skype call. 

She packed up her bag, deciding to leave the papers on the floor. If Darcy hadn’t gotten to them already, she’d deal with them in the morning. She began the short walk to her apartment, noting that there were sirens in the distance. She noticed a car stopped in the road. It wasn’t moving despite the green light. No one was inside. 

She cautiously moved closer and found that the engine was on and the doors were locked, with the keys in the ignition. A purse sat in the passenger seat and a charging phone sat in the cup holder. The seats were dusty, as if the car had been sitting there for a long time, but it clearly hadn’t been. There was still plenty of gas in the tank. 

Looking around, Jane started to notice other things amiss. A hose was spraying water into a lawn unattended. A car alarm sounded in the distance, whereas the neighborhood was usually quiet. A man sat on the steps of his porch, drinking a beer. Seeing her, he raised his glass and said, “Happy end of the world.” Then the laughed to himself and shook his head. 

Still standing near the car, Jane almost jumped out of her skin when she sensed motion inside, but it was just the phone receiving another call. 

Pulling out her own phone, Jane saw she had missed several calls and messages while she’d had it on silent in the lab. It was the university alert that caught her attention first, though:  
“UNIVERSITY EMERGENCY ALERT: A global catastrophe is affecting the area. If you are in need of immediate medical assistance, call the police. If your need is not immediate, please call the non-emergency campus safety number and we will assist you as soon as we are able. Please send an email to the office of the registrar confirming your status. If you are certain of any who have disappeared, please also notify the registrar. The school will be closed tomorrow for all nonessential personnel.”

She pulled up Google news. 

Most Read: Billions Bite the Dust  
Highly Cited: Billions Lost in Unexplained Catastrophe  
In-Depth: Is This Another Alien Disease? What We Know So Far

Reading each one, she tried to comprehend what was happening. The pile of dust on the floor of the lab. Darcy. Turning, she ran back to the lab. From the chemistry lab down the hall, she grabbed a clean sealable container. She carefully corralled the ashy dust from the lab floor into the container and labeled it neatly with Darcy’s name as if it were any other scientific piece of evidence. It had a considerable weight, packed into the box, probably about as much as Darcy weighed, come to think of it. Hand’s slightly shaking she lifted the canister on the shelf. It would be safe here, locked in her lab. 

She should go home. Try to contact her family. Try to contact Erik again. But instead, she wandered over to the adjoining building, down to the basement where the biology labs were. With any luck, she’d find someone there who could let her into the lab. The world was in crisis and that meant that now, more than ever, it was time to science.


	2. Ethics and Experimentation

Paige Weiss was in her lab, so Jane knocked on the door. The woman looked up, startled. There weren’t usually many people still at work after eight in the evenings. She supposed the dust debacle only made her knock seem more eerie. 

She spoke through the door, “Paige, I’m so glad you’re here. I was trying to think of something to do about all this and biology seemed the best place to start.”

“You mean trying to figure all of this out?”

“Isn’t that why you’re here and not at home?”

“I just wanted to pull some cultures out of the centrifuge to spin up some other time since we don’t have to come in tomorrow.” 

“Well, you’ve got the tools to figure this out. I don’t specialize in biology, but I know enough that I can at least be helpful.”

“You expect us to figure that out? I’m a cellular kinecticist.” 

Jane recalled hearing about Paige’s research once at a lunch meeting. “We’re scientists. Figuring out stuff is what we do.”

“There are other people working on it. Stark’s people, I’m sure.”

It was a fair point. Jane had stopped to ask herself why she wanted to work on this so badly while she was on the stairs down here. It wasn’t because of her connection with Thor or that she felt bad about not even noticing Darcy had vanished for hours (which she did feel terrible about). It was because problem-solving was how she dealt with crisis. So she said, “We all need to work on it. And I’ve got some ideas of where to start.”

Paige moved the rest of her ongoing work into the freezer. She pulled two whiteboard markers and an eraser from a drawer and handed the blue one to Jane. “Ok, let’s do this, then.”

Jane started writing out a list of things they knew and a list of questions to answer. Paige contributed every so often, nodding when Jane added things to the board. 

Jane felt the panic leaving her chest, the tension loosening from her shoulders. Her breaths were less shallow and a knot of fear she hadn’t even been fully aware of left her stomach. Science was just so methodical. Once you started, there was another step just a finite distance away. Even if you couldn’t see the end result, you could always see what came next and you could find a way to get there. It was much easier to live that way, she thought, parceling out everything she couldn’t understand into knowable pieces. 

Before the hour was out, the two women had two respectable lists. 

Known:  
\- Worldwide extent  
\- Near simultaneous onset and duration  
\- Piles of dust left in place of those who disappeared  
\- No initial trends in who disappeared

Unknown:   
\- Why some people were affected and others not  
\- How was this affect brought on? Transmitted via signal? Biologically? Electrically?  
\- Composition of dust

There were certainly many more unknowns. There was, of course, the question everyone was no doubt asking: could this be fixed? But as a scientist, Jane had learned that it was best to start with the focused questions. Results would come and then their questions could get more useful.

“We could start with the composition.” Jane opined. 

“Yeah, but with which dust pile? What are even the ethics for this kind of situation?”

“Well we shouldn’t worry about the university review board. This is an emergency.”

“We can’t just experiment on any dust we find.” Paige looked nervous.

Jane wondered if Paige had lost anyone. She tried to think of who would be willing to give their dust pile to science. She liked to think most people would, but then again some people didn’t even let science have them when they died of natural causes. That was it! “What if we find someone who is an organ donor?”

“Ok. I like that. We would need to identify a pile of ashes confidently as a specific person and know they’re an organ donor.” 

“We could look in the other labs.”

“There’s not a good way to be sure that’s the PI versus an undergrad working on their thesis.”

“Oh.”

“You’d mentioned you found your lab assistant’s dust. I know it might be weird to work on someone you know.” 

Jane hesitated. She didn’t think she could work on the dust knowing that it had, up until a few hours ago, been her cheerful if not quirky assistant. She should call her family. If she had their number. If they were alive. While these thoughts flitted through her mind, she said, “Darcy was always very insistent about not dying in the name of science.” 

“We could still check to see if she’s an organ donor, right?”

“It’s not like her clothes or anything were on the floor. I think that means her driver’s license also poofed.” Jane paused, then said, “But, I could see if her license was scanned in as part of her application to work with me.”

Paige offered Jane her laptop and Jane opened up her online file storage. She ran a search for Darcy. There. Darcy’s original application for the new Mexico internships. She’d only been after those six college credits. Who’d have thought it would have led to all this?

She tried to think of what Darcy would tell her to do in this situation, besides to sleep on it. It occurred to Jane that as well as she knew Darcy, she didn’t know what Darcy believed in, what her basic principles were. To be fair, it wasn’t exactly the topic of idle conversations, but maybe if she hadn’t always been so distracted, she’d have a better idea of what Darcy would want now.

Darcy was an organ donor. Well, maybe Darcy would get to help save the world again.


	3. Results

Carbon. 81.8% carbon, to be exact. The rest was calcium, phosphorous, magnesium, potassium, sulfur, and other unsurprising elements. Moreover, the total sampling of dust was about a fifth of Darcy’s most recently recorded weight. 

It painted a rather gruesome picture to the scientifically trained eye. 

Even Jane knew that the four elements that made up the majority of all living matter on Earth was carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, though not in that order. A quick reference to a textbook confirmed her suspicion that the elemental breakdown and total weight of the dust made sense for the aggregate composition of the human body.

There was one more thing to check. “Paige,” she asked, “do you have that thin section prepared?”

“Yeah, Sample D1 is ready to go.”

“I know it’s standard practice to use official sample names, but this is too weird, I know it’s Darcy.”

“And that’s why I’m also part of this analysis. I don’t her. It should help eliminate any unintentional bias of our results. Now, I’m just trying to get into the lab next door. It has the electron microscope we need.”

“You don’t have access?”

“No, and Ken isn’t answering his cell. I don’t want to think about what that probably means.” She added. 

“So, you’re going to smash through the glass?”

“No, of course not. These lab doors are resistant to shattering because of the risk of explosions. We’re going to have to short out the card reader.”

Jane finally turned her attention away from the mass spectrometer results to see Paige dismantling the coffee machine from the student lounge and the outer casing to the key reader. 

“Okay, I’m going to plug it in.” Paige said after some time. 

Jane watched as the key card reader blinked red, then yellow, before its light went out and a small bit of smoke poured forth. They were in.

Powering up the microscope and affixing the slide, Jane and Paige took turns looking at the sample. 

Somehow, Darcy had been separated into individual atoms. 

“Jane, tell me I’m not going crazy and that you’re seeing this, too.”

“I see it.” She paused to think. “How is that even possible?”

“I don’t know.”

“Whatever did this broke down every type of molecular bond over a timescale so short so as not to produce liquids. Just dust.” Jane marveled at the implications.

“There’s no biological or chemical process I know of that could do that.”

“We’ve got to tell people.” Jane said, saving the data from the mass spectrometer and microscope onto a jump drive and preserving the samples. 

“Well, we can’t exactly write a paper. We probably violated any reputable journal’s ethics and I highly doubt anyone’s mind is on publishing the next issue under these circumstances.”

“We could write a memo. They’re fairly common in observational astronomy. We can send it out to scientists we know and to journalists. People need to be able to work with this data before they’re forced to make their own decisions about their dusted coworkers.” Jane was not about to let Darcy’s sacrifice be insignificant.

“You’re right. I just can’t help but see this as the end of our careers and I’m not certain it will amount to anything.” 

Jane sympathized. She remember when her career was all she’d had. But she’d seen other planets, had a dangerous red ‘stone’ inside of her, and met aliens. Science couldn’t keep up with everything happening. It was her responsibility to make sure science was moving as fast as it could. 

“Paige, I understand. But this is our job: to discover information and tell others. The world is facing literal giants, and I think it’s time we gave the rest of the world some shoulders to stand on.” Jane said, paraphrasing Newton. 

“Alright, let’s write this.” 

Their memo was short. It presented their results and interpretations, followed by the necessary information about their methods. They explained the decisions they’d made and hoped the world would not judge them too harshly for it. Then, they sent it through their own academic communities, to whatever journals they could think of (regardless of the field of science), and to a few news publications. 

Jane knew it would probably be lost in the shuffle at the news agencies for a while, who were indubitably understaffed. She doubted that the journal editors would be checking their inbox. 

That left her with one option. She needed to find a way to contact Thor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Updates will be a bit slower this week, but I promise they're on the way. 
> 
> Comments make my day- let me know what you think!


	4. Calling Your Ex Who Doesn't Have a Cell Phone

“Heimdall!” Jane shouted. 

She felt a bit silly, out here in the faculty parking lot, shouting at sky. She remembered Thor had called Heimdall, that the man was supposed to be able to see everything in the universe. 

There was no answer. Either calling Heimdall only worked for Thor or he hadn’t survived the dusting. 

She wished, for what was probably the thousandth time in her life, that Thor had a cell phone. 

She sat in the parking lot for several minutes, trying to think of what to do and trying to distract herself from processing everything that had just happened. 

Finally, she walked back inside to her lab and made her way to the worn box labeled simply, ‘Puente Antiguo.’ There was even a bit of sand still at the bottom of the box. Sifting through the stacks of paper inside, she eventually came across what she’d been looking for. 

It was a plain black card with the words:   
Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division  
Phillip J. Coulson

It was followed by a phone number that she had remembered the agent telling her to call if she had any more alien encounters. She hadn’t followed that directive in the past and she wasn’t sure SHIELD even existed right now, after everything that had happened in D.C.

Still, she tried dialing the number. 

“Hello?” answered a feminine voice. 

“Hello. This is Jane Foster. I’m calling for Phillip Coulson.”

“Uh, one second.” 

Jane heard whispers on the other end. Then the voice returned.

“Phil isn’t available right now, but I might be able to help you. My name is Daisy.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you all are enjoying the story so far :) 
> 
> I'd love to hear you comments, speculations, reactions, thoughts, suggestions, or favorite recipes :P


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